[外语类试卷]大学英语四级模拟试卷674及答案与解析.doc
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1、大学英语四级模拟试卷 674及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing (30 minutes) 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should the Rich Show off Their Wealth? You should write at least 120 words following the outline given below. 1现在富人炫富正成为一种 社会现象 2人们对此现象看法不一 3我认为 Should the Rich Show off Th
2、eir Wealth? 二、 Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions attached to the passage. For questions 1-7, mark: Y (for YES) if the statement agrees with the information give
3、n in the passage; N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG (for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage. 1 When It Comes to Water, We are All Maya Now Its possible that the impressive Maya civilization with mastery of mathematics, farming, wa
4、ter management, pyramid building and city planning was undone by summer rain. Not enough summer rain. Undone, in fact, by exactly the kind of rainfall changes, we ourselves are starting to experience small shifts in rainfall that persist, and end up having an outsized impact. The Maya dominated the
5、Yucatan Peninsula for 600 years, and their settlement and civilization there spanned more than 1,000 years. And yet the great Maya cities collapsed and were abandoned to the jungle over a period of between 100 and 200 years. What happened is the subject of wide scholarly debates although drought (干旱
6、 ) has often been argued as the major source of the Mayas termination, a long-lasting and damaging drought. The debates have lacked hard data, until last week. In the journal Science, weve now got a graph showing the rainfall over the Yucatan, during the last 200 years of Maya dominance from the yea
7、r 800 to the year 1000. Actually, its not quite a graph of rainfall: Its a graph of each years difference from the typical rainfall. The years 810 to 815 were pretty wet 10 percent more rainfall than usual. The years 820 to 840 were harsh not a single year of even average rainfall, and decades of ye
8、ars with 30 percent less rainfall than usual. Whats so striking is that the periods of drought were relatively short, often broken by brief good rain, and the actual fall-off in rainfall seems relatively modest 20 to 40 percent less than usual in the dry periods. In fact, over a period of 200 years,
9、 there are only a couple deep troughs (波谷 ) reaching to 40 percent less than usual. Could the Mayas have been undone by that kind of shift in rainfall over 100 or 150 years? We think the disastrous collapse of a civilization requires an equally disastrous cause. But what if our expectation of water
10、availability is so fixed that we lose track of it? What if small shifts in rainfall can have a surprisingly dramatic impact? “ Perhaps,“ write the papers authors, “ the impact of these droughts was rather modest despite the large associated environmental and societal disruptions. “ The detailed pict
11、ure of Maya rainfall is the work of two climate scientists, Martin Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling, and they analyzed lakebed substances that revealed the rainfall. Their conclusions are remarkably detailed Medina-Elizalde and Rohling were able to tease out the difference between the rainy season
12、rainfall of the summers and the drier season rainfall of the winters. They found that it was the summer rainfall that fell off and that much of the fall-off may have been due to fewer hurricanes (飓风 ), or hurricanes of reduced intensity. We tend to be pretty confident in our ability to see and measu
13、re whats going on around us, to understand it, and to adjust. Its not certain what happened to the Maya but one thing is true: They had sophisticated systems for accessing groundwater and for collecting, storing, and distributing rainwater. Like our own systems, the Maya systems were elaborate and f
14、ixed in place. When the rain failed to appear in the quantities they had become used to, they didnt have the flexibility to adapt their water system to serve the millions of people who relied on it. They had built a civilization assuming a certain quantity of water, and when 20 or 30 percent less wa
15、ter appeared consistently, their entire way of life, perhaps especially food cultivation, became unsustainable. The authors themselves note, somewhat dryly, that the variations in rainfall they found during the period when Maya civilization disintegrated “ are not far outside the range of those prec
16、eding this time interval, when the Maya civilization flourished. “ That is, the amount of rain, and the variation in that rain, wasnt too different between dominance and destruction. Heres the amazing thing. Were not actually much better off than the Mayas except for having a wealth of data to track
17、 our own vulnerability. Last year, rainfall in Houston, Texas, was 55 percent less than usual. How will Houston get along if that persists for a couple years? And then theres the story of Perth, Australia. Perth is the first western city to confront the possibility of truly running out of water. The
18、 circumstance in Perth in 2012 is startlingly similar to that in the Yucatan Peninsula in 912. Perth has seen average rainfall drop 20 percent over the last 25 years. Water collected by its reservoirs fell by 75 percent over that same period. Why? Because the reservoirs were built assuming a certain
19、 amount and location of rainfall. As one Perth official put it, “All of a sudden, it looked like wed built our reservoirs in the wrong place. “ For a chilling bar graph of what it looks like when a city looks water disaster in the eye, nothing matches the simple chart Perths water utility has put up
20、 online. The crisis Perth confronted in the late 1990s, and avoided, was identical to that faced by Maya water managers except Perth got the leadership and vision to fix its water problems. Most super-sized modern cities would be in a similar crisis if their long-term water availability suddenly dro
21、pped 20 percent not to say 30 or 40 percent. Our city water systems have no better adaptability than those of the Maya. Indeed, during the cruel 10-year drought in Australia, many big reservoirs were down to 30 or 20 or 10 percent capacity there is nothing more threatening than a city-sized reservoi
22、r that is 80 percent empty. The lesson of the Maya and the lesson of Perth are the same. Our water assumptions are just that: assumptions. We should be building city water cultures that have flexibility, multiple sources, the ability to re-use water, the ability to conserve. Real strategic thinking
23、about water isnt about a new water treatment plant, or a plan to replace aging water mains. Its about knowing what youll do if youre suddenly faced with a 10 or 20 percent loss of available water, permanently. Being ready for that kind of shift would change how we all think about water from factory
24、managers to dads doing the dishes. In fact, we are all Maya. 2 What is the reason for the author to mention Mayas rainfall changes? ( A) He conducted a research on the topic. ( B) He read an article concerning the topic. ( C) He used the topic to alarm readers. ( D) He cited it as an example for arg
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- 外语类 试卷 大学 英语四 模拟 674 答案 解析 DOC
